With the popularity of smartphones, applications developed for smartphones are increasing. Users may download and install various applications in a mobile phone at their own discretion, and may simultaneously start multiple applications. More concurrently running processes indicate more occupied memory in the mobile phone, thereby causing a decrease in operating performance of the mobile phone. Therefore, memory cleaning needs to be performed on the mobile phone, so as to release a part of memory to improve operating performance of the mobile phone.
In the prior art, mainly, memory cleaning software is preset in a mobile phone, the memory cleaning software may monitor a status of memory in the mobile phone, and when available memory is less than a first preset value, performs cleaning on memory of the mobile phone, that is, performs sequencing according to lengths of times of running of application processes switched to running in a background; then, performs cleaning, according to a sequence starting from a process of which a time of running of the process switched to running in the background is the longest, on memory occupied by processes, until the available memory is greater than a second preset value, so as to achieve an objective of releasing a part of memory to improve operating performance of the mobile phone.
However, in the prior art, cleaning is performed, according to a length of a time of running of a process switched to running in a background, on memory occupied by an application; therefore, an application frequently used by a user may be cleaned from the memory, thereby causing a relatively long response time required when the user starts the application again.